Since it was launched, IBM's 10-year-old India Research Laboratory (IRL)
has been dedicated "to advance state-of-the-art breakthroughs in IT through
research in software and services," says IRL director Gurudath Banavar in
an interview. He says the lab's researchers are unique in their drive to
develop globally relevant advancements that impact business and society in
a positive way, and among the lab's standout features are a rich well of
talent, a novel innovative culture that permits ideas from a broad spectrum
of scientific fields to cross-pollinate, and a thorough comprehension of
end-user technology. IRL is where the IBM Mobile Web initiative began, and
Banavar says the initiative's Spoken Web, or voice-enabled mobile commerce
technologies, could potentially cross the chasm between India's digital
haves and have-nots by setting up a global telecom Web of sites that are
accessible over voice and established on a telephony network instead of the
Internet. The Spoken Web will allow anyone to create a Web site through
the use of a voice interface, which Banavar believes "will enable the
creation of significant new content in the voice-enabled Web portal that
will help village communities offer their services and products to the
world at large." Among IRL societal innovations the lab director cites is
the IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology, which can facilitate
understanding and transcription of human speech with minimal use of
keyboards, and can be advantageous to people who lack computer literacy.
The technology has allowed IRL and the Center for Development of Advanced
Computing to create a continuous speech-recognition system that is Hindi
speaker-independent. Banavar says mobile phones are a more likely
technology for bridging the digital divide than PCs or laptops because of
their portability, their extended battery life, and their
inexpensiveness.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Title IX law, which forbids sexual discrimination in education, has
primarily applied to sports, but new pressure from Congress has some
federal agencies focusing Title IX toward science. The National Science
Foundation, NASA, and the Energy Department have established programs to
detect sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants.
Investigators have been taking lab inventories and interviewing faculty
members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools such
as Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland. So far, the Title
IX compliance reviews have only served to upset faculty members, with
Columbia University physicist Amber Miller calling her interview "a
complete waste of time." Some critics fear the process could lead to a
quota system that could significantly hurt scientific research and only
damage the role of women in science. However, the members of Congress and
women's groups pushing for the application of Title IX to science say there
is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences. Critics of
the new effort say there is better research showing that, on average,
women's interest in some fields of science is just not the same as men's.
Neither side argues that women cannot excel in all fields of science, and
the increasing number of women in formerly male-dominated positions is a
chief arguing point against intervention. "Colleges already practice
affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so
intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota
systems," says American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Christina
Hoff Sommers. "It'll be devastating to American science if every
male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women's level of interest."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Lawmakers are investigating a new online tactic used by advertising
companies working with Internet service providers (ISPs) to track Internet
users' activities. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Energy
and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, says
Internet tracking across different Web sites should take place only with
customers' consent, and the Internet should be governed by the same privacy
regulations as those that apply to telephone and cable services. Rep. Joe
Barton (R-Texas) agrees, saying, "I understand the need to collate
information. I just don't think it should be done without my permission."
Although Internet companies have been tracking users' searches for years to
match advertisements to their interests, the practice of third-party
companies collaborating with ISPs to track users' online activities across
the Web is new. Privacy advocates and some lawmakers argue the practice
should be regulated because it gives ad companies unprecedented access to
Internet users' movements. Although ad companies say they do not collect
personally identifiable information, critics worry that companies retain
data on individuals, even if it masks their identities.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The goal of the ReCaptcha project is to use captcha technology--distorted
word puzzles that humans can successfully solve but machines such as spam
bots cannot--to improve machines' identification of scanned text that a
computer has trouble recognizing optically due to faded ink or blurriness,
so that print archives can be more effectively mined by search engines.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor and ReCaptcha creator Luis von
Ahn says up to 600 million people have completed at least one ReCaptcha on
sites that use the technology in the last year, and such activity is aiding
and expediting ambitious text-scanning initiatives such as the New York
Times digitization project. Von Ahn debuted the ReCaptcha free antispam
system with a double-word test in 2007, and this test allows the system to
formulate a confidence rating for the human by presenting one word the
computer does not know with another it does know. People type 200 million
captchas globally every day by von Ahn's calculations, while the incredible
amount of time people spend playing games drove the CMU professor to
initiate a project to tap this pastime to tackle major computational
challenges. One game borne from that project, the ESP Game, was designed
to enhance Web search using image labeling by asking two randomly paired
people on different systems to describe the same image without any
communication, and to predict the same word for the image within a time
limit. Von Ahn and a group of CMU computer scientists have rolled out four
new games to address different challenges in the field of artificial
intelligence partly due to the success of the ESP Game.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Computing Community Consortium Chairman Ed Lazowska cites CRA Taulbee
Survey data indicating an upward trend in freshmen interest and enrollments
in computer science, and points to people's perceptions of the job market
and the degree of "buzz" associated with the field of computer science as
the most critical factors underlying fluctuations in enrollments. He notes
that the number of annually granted computer science PhDs has ballooned in
the past two years, and he attributes this trend to the collapse of many
startups in 2001 and the consequential influx of top bachelors graduates
into the job market. Lazowska says interest in bachelors programs
experienced a similar decline sparked by the tech implosion, a lack of
abundance of and sexiness about tech jobs, and media-promulgated fear about
offshoring. However, since then tech has reacquired its cool factor and
startups and jobs are plentiful. "Computer science degrees ... [are]
heading back up, and it's important to keep things in perspective relative
to other fields," Lazowska writes. Lazowska notes that a background in
computer science can be applicable to many kinds of careers in disciplines
as diverse as law, medicine, business, and biotechnology. He points to
Bureau of Labor Statistics projections show that 70 percent of all
newly-created jobs between now and 2016 will be in computer science, while
62 percent of all job openings will be in that field. The author concludes
that companies and individuals should put pressure on the federal
government to create policies to support education and research in order to
boost the population of computer science grads as well as the field's
allure.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Virtual world developers are working to make using the Internet and
existing in a virtual world a more uniform experience. Second Life
developer Linden Lab previously developed a Web link embedded in Second
Life that opens an outside browser window, but Linden Lab is now adjusting
the technology to make it easier to bring data into its virtual world from
the Web and from users' desktops. Second Life's Joe Miller says the
company is trying to create a rich way of experiencing a variety of media
types that generally need to be seen or read on the Web in two dimensions.
For example, Linden Lab's new system will enable Second Life users to
create business cards in the virtual world that link to external Web pages,
or virtual MP3 players that connect to Web radio services. Linden Lab is
also working to make it easier to share data such as Microsoft Word files
or PowerPoint presentations with others inside the virtual world. Miller
says these new features should be delivered by the end of the year as part
of Linden Lab's Web Media Initiative. Linden Lab is also developing the
open source uBrowser project, a system that can superimpose any Web content
on a three-dimensional surface that can be embedded in Second Life. For
example, a Second Life user could use uBrowser to create a wall that is
constantly being updated with posts from a blog or Twitter.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have developed a robot
that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) to recognize dishes and
other kitchen items. Research leader Michael Beetz says RFID enables the
robot to recognize nearby objects and know what to do with them without
having to process massive amounts of visual information. The robot can
also use RFID to learn the movement patterns of objects. "Setting the
table is very easily recognized from cups and plates disappearing from the
cupboard and appearing on the table, and cleaning up later is characterized
by the same objects disappearing from the table and appearing in the
dishwasher," Beetz says. The researchers are also working to integrate
several open source software packages into the robot's core architecture to
allow it to get instructions from the Internet, which could be used to
optimize the algorithms, such as teaching the robot to carry four plates at
once instead of one plate four times. "If you have sensors just on the
robot, the range of things the robot can perceive is very limited," says
Stanford University roboticist Andrew Ng. "If it is able to use sensors
embedded in an intelligent environment, it's as if the robot has many more
eyes and sensors and can immediately act much more intelligently in a new
environment."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Zotero is a freely available research collection, management, and citation
system developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New
Media (CHNM) and underwritten by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library
Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
CHNM director and Zotero co-developer Daniel Cohen says Zotero was
conceived as a tool that resides in the Web browser with a high degree of
awareness of the operations transpiring within the browser, and capable of
engaging with elements both on the browser and the desktop. Cohen says the
tool "uses Semantic Web principles in an utterly pragmatic and invisible
fashion; indeed, the user experience is so seamless and the use of semantic
metadata so inconspicuous that Zotero is often not mentioned in discussions
of the next generation of the Web." The project's next step is Zotero's
employment as a digital research platform as well as a mechanism for the
networked sharing of semantic and computational information, and Cohen says
the Zotero Server, once linked to the client, will facilitate data-mining
of aggregated collections and new openings for collaboration. He says
scholars who use the Internet are challenged by a vast body of digitized
objects that cannot be easily managed or analyzed, and it is his hope that
Zotero will "bring digital research--from basic to advanced processes like
HPC--to the average scholar through its easy-to-use interface and its
ability to communicate with software and services wherever they may be."
Cohen says the problems of digital object abundance, management, and
analysis exist for many people outside the humanities and social science
disciplines, so Zotero ought to be applicable to them as well.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The European Union-funded Interactive European Grid (Int.eu.grid) project
is enabling researchers in a variety of fields to process their data
through a network of computers at 10 sites in seven European countries.
The Int.eu.grid connects computers locally and across Europe through the
existing high-speed Geant research network. The project focused on
providing a transparent way to simulate, process, and store large amounts
of data. Int.eu.grid coordinator Jesus Marco says the grid exploits the
fact that local users do not use all their power at the same time, allowing
researchers access to more resources than they could normally obtain.
Int.eu.grid provides researchers access to the aggregation of processing
power from the networked centers to achieve a processing speed of up to
10,000 megabytes per second. Researchers can interactively guide their
calculations and receive help at all stages of the process, from initial
setup to the final discussion of the results. Marco says the ability to
process data faster is already helping doctors detect breast cancer, while
physicists have used the grid to visualize the trajectory of particles, and
environmental scientists have used the grid to gain additional insight into
the operations of watersheds in Spain.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

An effort to double the number of U.S. bachelor's degrees awarded in
science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) by 2015 is significantly
behind schedule, according to a new report from Tapping America's
Potential, a group formed by 15 prominent business groups in 2005. The
group warned that a lack of STEM workers and teachers threatened U.S.
competitiveness and predicted that the U.S. would need 400,000 new STEM
graduates by 2015. The new report says the number of degrees in STEM
fields increased slightly earlier in the decade, but has since stalled at
around 225,000 per year. Although the group says there has been
substantial bipartisan support for increasing science training, including
last year's passage of the "America Competes Act," there has been
insufficient follow-through with funding to support the programs, and other
countries are doing more. Critics say the concerns from business about the
number of science graduates are overblown and self-serving, but Accenture
CEO William Green says such criticisms are "nonsense." He notes that the
entire country benefits from competitive companies, and says increasing the
number of STEM professionals is one of the top three items on CEO agendas
of every company he knows. The report also argues that the inability of
Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform has hurt U.S.
competitiveness by making it difficult to retain highly-skilled workers who
study at American universities.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The University of Manchester will use its Brain Box supercomputer project
to support research on the speech and language function of the brain. The
project will develop a new supercomputer that will use biological
principles to perform highly complex functions in a manner similar to the
human brain. "The Brain Box computer is being built using simple
microprocessors that are designed to interact like the networks of neurons
in the brain allowing it to replicate sophisticated functions such as
speech," says Manchester professor Steve Furber. The university plans to
use the Brain Box supercomputer in its five-year Chatter Box project.
Chatter Box is an effort to build a model of human language capable of
understanding basic words in English, validate the model, use it to predict
the results of speech therapy strategies, and test the predictions on
stroke patients who have speech problems.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A bug in a standard part of Unix dating back to the 1970s has been fixed
by Otto Moerbeek, an OpenBSD developer. The bug affected the yacc parser
generator, which was developed by Stephen C. Johnson at AT&T, and is only
triggered on Sparc64 systems. "Funny thing is that I traced this back to
Sixth Edition Unix, released in 1975," Moerbeek says in a note about the
bug. A user tipped off Moerbeek that compiling large C++ projects
sometimes fails with an internal compiler error on the Sparc64 hardware
platform when using a new malloc. Moerbeek found the bug while testing the
general purpose memory allocator, which has new features that improve the
prospects of catching buffer overflows. In May, Swiss developer Marc
Balmer found a flaw in the open source Berkeley Software Distribution
operating system that was 25 years old.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and Southampton University in the United Kingdom say their
plan for creating a Web science discipline is gaining momentum, and they
are now looking for corporate involvement. The group of leading academics
announced the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) at MIT in November
2006, and the response has been positive because the industry recognizes
the magnitude of the Web. "It's now so big... that we need methods to
understand it and as you understand it you might think of ways of improving
it," says professor Nigel Shadbolt, co-director of WSRI. The institute
plans to coordinate an examination of the economic, social, and political
aspects of the Web to better understand its development and why people use
it. "[Students] need to be taught something about techniques for looking
at structures, tracking data through complex networks, how to understand
the basic economics and social psychology of interaction so they've got
some appreciation of how the Web phenomena work on the whole," Shadbolt
says. WSRI will address the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and other Web
phenomena, and the future of linked data, the semantic Web, and other
concepts.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

European researchers working on the
nano-electro-mechanical-system-integrated-circuits (NEMSIC) project aim to
launch the world's smallest, high performance, low-power silicon-based
sensor. The sensor features the co-integration of single-electron
transistors (SETs) and nano-electro-mechanical (NEM) systems on a common
silicon technology platform. University of Southampton professor Hiroshi
Mizuta says the current focus is on power consumption because devices use
power whether they are actively running or not. "The single-electron
transistor combined with the NEM device technology reduces power
consumption at both ON and OFF states of the sensor," says Mizuta, adding
that the ability to create a full "sleep" with the NEM when it switches to
off will help stand-by power consumption fall to zero. The researchers are
developing the single-electron transistor with a suspended silicon
nanobridge that will have the capability to detect biological and chemical
molecules. "This is the first time that anyone has combined these two
nanotechnologies to develop a smart sensor," Mizuta says.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Web developers face a difficult challenge maintaining their skill sets in
an environment where the latest technologies are constantly changing,
writes Neil McAllister. Writing a traditional, standards-based Web
application means writing JavaScript code, which, unlike traditional
programming languages such as C and Java, does not have a standard function
library, giving developers a dozen AJAX libraries to choose from. There
are also tools that attempt to eliminate the JavaScript dilemma, such as
Google's Web Toolkit, which allows developers to write applications in Java
and compile them down to JavaScript for execution in the browser.
Proprietary platforms based on plug-ins, such as Curl, Flash, and
Silverlight, offer developers more consistency and stability. However,
each of these platforms has a unique development methodology and
familiarity with one does not necessarily translate to the others.
McAllister says that the current market fragmentation creates a skills
crisis, with no single Web developer being able to excel at all of the
technologies, particularly when the development methodologies behind some
of the technologies are virtual opposites. He says the most agile
developers are those who approach programming with a solid background in
computer science.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

University of Maryland computer scientists have developed a method that
sharpens or smoothes edges to make an area or object stand out in
three-dimensional (3D) images. The technique could be used by artists
designing 3D graphics, creating virtual scenes that are better at helping
viewers understand a variety of images, or to create a more rewarding
interactive experience. Computer scientist Amitabh Varshney says the
technique shows that geometry alterations can persuade visual attention in
a meaningful way. "Until now, the only channels of modification available
to a visual attention persuader were the same ones that have been used for
centuries--color, illumination, and detail contrasts," Varshney says. "Our
work shows that one can now add geometry to that mix." Graphic artists can
select an area that they want to catch the viewer's attention, and use a
mesh filter to sharpen, or emphasize, the centermost points of the area.
The more pronounced the original topography, the greater the effect.
Eye-tracking tests show that there is a subtle persuasion toward the
selected region of interest, with subjects spending significantly more time
gazing at the geometrically altered regions in various 3D scenes. An
advantage of geometry-based alterations is that they can be used in
addition to other principles of visual persuasion, such as contrasts in
color, luminance, and texture.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Product designers often overlook the needs of older and disabled users,
and recent design research has established a number of strategies to help
companies create mainstream products that boast greater accessibility,
writes John Clarkson, director of Cambridge University's Engineering Design
Center (EDC). The implementation of these strategies has been spotty for
reasons that include a dearth of practical knowledge and tools to support
more inclusive design; not enough time, budget, or resources; and the
perceived absence of a justifiable business case. An inclusive design
toolkit developed by the EDC and freely available online outlines a
business case and communicates how it can be promoted within an
organization and incorporated into a typical commercial product development
process based on an understanding of business and user needs. Clarkson
notes that the Web site also features a series of tools to help designers
comprehend and interact with users, especially those with limited
faculties. Another component allows designers to gain insights into the
limitations of users with disabilities by experiencing their disabilities
through special eyewear, gloves, and other equipment. "Simulation software
demonstrates the main functional effects of common vision and hearing
impairments on image and sound files, thus helping designers understand how
these impairments affect the use of everyday products," Clarkson says.
"Designers can also view photographs of their own concepts with simulated
impairment, to help identify difficulties and potential improvements."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top